Transcribed from video:
– Deloading. So basically a deload week is where you reduce the stimulus of a session, over a week. So you’re giving your body time to respond and time to repair, and we do those every eight weeks here and the athletes in our programme following generally every eight weeks. Some can do it more frequently, some less frequently. It depends on the individual recovery profile of the athletes. Some tissues require a lot longer to recover than others. And you guys will know that, some muscle groups feel like they stay sore for longer than others. But then things like tendons take a lot longer to recover than just your muscle. They can take days, weeks to recover. So every now and then, having a period of deload can be really effective. What are the benefits of a deload? Supercompensation to the last training cycle. All this stimulus, this is the time when your body goes, right now we’re repairing when we get back to full training or competing we’re going to get a lot of benefit. Your nervous system starts to recover. You don’t have that, I’ve been hit by a truck, sort of feeling. We talked about the neuromuscular fatigue grading scale. This is where we just go all down to ones and twos, feeling good. Starts to optimise your hormone levels. One of the effects of over training, particularly in women, is that it really messes with the hormone levels, cycles become irregular, and it causes a whole raft of problems later in life. Low bone mineral density, etc. So it just helps to normalise and bring them back to where they should be. Even things like testosterone, growth hormone, cortisol, stress hormones, will start to normalise with a little bit of a break there. It’s good mental recovery and a recharge. You don’t go to sleep every night and the last thing you think about is the training you’ve got the next morning and you don’t wake up in the morning thinking about what exercise do I have to do today, you just get to chill for a little bit. The intensity the week before the deload. You know you’ve got that deload coming up and I’ll always let my athletes know you’re deloading in a week, so work hard this week to earn it. And some of the best results can often happen then, even though it’s when they’re most fatigued, because they go, okay I’ve got to go all out, I’ve got to earn my dessert at the end of the meal. And it prepares your body for increased training volume after that deload. You go out of the deload feeling really good, feeling fresh, ready to go again. Now, should you be doing a deload? Only if your current intensity and volume warrants it. If you’re someone who’s exercising three times a week you probably don’t need a deload. Okay, so you’re doing half an hour three times a week, probably not applicable for you. I don’t train enough to need a deload, but a lot of the athletes that I coach with and work with do. So you can’t deload what you haven’t loaded. It doesn’t work. I need a deload after this weekend. You should be proactive not reactive. So you don’t want to train to the point where you’re like, ah man I’m not good, I need a deload. You’re a week late. Yeah, so, every eight weeks I’m going to deload. No, that didn’t work, I broke down at six. Then every six weeks you deload and you stick with that. If you don’t feel like you need it, take it, still. Still have that deload. I’d rather you slightly under than slightly over. It’s a deload, it’s not an unload, it’s not a rest. So you’re still actually training during that time and we’ll talk about how to change intensity and the volume of that training in a moment. You don’t want to add in a lot of extra stuff. So, you don’t want to be saying, oh, I’m deloading therefore I can do a big trial run and do all this other stuff as well. We talk about this tank of stress and you can only put so much stuff in this tank before it overflows and you’re over training. Don’t add more stuff. It takes away your recovery resources. You want all your recovery resources, all your stress fighting responses, to go into repairing and fixing your body from what’s been a really big, hard cycle of training. So take that time off. So how do we actually do it? Like I said, anywhere from four to eight weeks is what most of the research recommends. I’m not currently working with any athletes who need a deload more than every six weeks. So, all of my athletes are either six or eight at the moment, with most of them being up around the eight mark. But could make adjustments based on when people need it more. How do we do it? Reduce the volume, the intensity, the loading, but keep the movements. So, a really good way to understand this is think of the 75% rule. Do everything that’s 75% of what you normally would. Do 75% of the volume, 75% of the load, 75% of the effort level. Anything that’s a measure of how much, how hard, how heavy, take it to 75% of what it normally would be. Okay, that, in the vast majority of cases is going to take you bang on for what you need to be doing for a deload. And avoid sessions with a high neuromuscular fatigue rating. We’ve talked about that rating yesterday. Those fours being like the heavy, barbell, high-rep conditioning stuff, just ease back on those. Maybe still do them, but if you normally do them at 80%, we go to 75% of that, we go at 60%. It doesn’t mean you didn’t move faster, because our intensity, our speed is at 75% as well. So you would end up getting the same score in a 15 minute AMRAP but 75% of the weight. You end up with the same score because 75% of the weights, 75% of the effort you end up about the same.
